Chief physician duty

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The chief physician obligation serves in Austria of control prescribed therapies for health-economic aspects. The background to this is the variety of drugs available on the market with very different prices. There are expensive products, the effectiveness of which has not yet been sufficiently tested, according to the argumentation of the health insurance companies , which also point out that there is also a cheaper drug for almost every disease that does not require approval.

Health insurance companies like doctors are legally obliged to use an economical way of prescribing.

On January 1, 2005, the new regulations on drug prescriptions issued by the Ministry of Health came into force in Austria on the basis of the ASVG . All drugs have been divided into new categories, and medical practitioners' approval should be submitted by fax by the resident doctors. During the division into the new box system, around 2,500 previously reimbursable drugs were assigned to the so-called no-box. According to the latest ASVG amendment, this means that these drugs can be prescribed and reimbursed "for urgent therapeutic reasons", ie in exceptional cases.

The introduction of the duty of a chief physician initially brought organizational chaos with it. The Austrian Medical Association and the Main Association of Austrian Social Insurance Institutions therefore agreed on changes to the obligation to be a chief physician on January 20, 2005: In future, doctors will no longer have to fill out their own form to document the medication that is subject to medical duties, it will be entered in the doctor's (already existing) patient file. A new reimbursement code is replacing the old “list of medicinal products”, which was criticized as being confusing and in which only freely prescribable medicines were listed. The medicinal specialties approved and reliably available for Austria are included in the reimbursement code.

According to a recent survey by the Linz market institute on behalf of Pharmig , the majority of Austrians categorically reject the obligation to be a chief physician. Two thirds of the doctors want to see the head physician's obligation abolished, only a third are in favor of head physician control. The vote is similar for Austrian patients: 40 percent support the call for the head physician to be abolished without replacement, 36 percent are more in favor. Only 14 percent are more likely to be against it and only 9 percent want to retain the duty of a chief physician. Unsurprisingly, the doctors' verdict on the duty of a chief physician is also new: 54 percent of the doctors surveyed see the new regulation as very negative, 28 percent rather negatively.

Since July 1, 2006, the necessary chief physician approval for a drug has been obtained across Austria via the so-called electronic ABS (= drug approval service).